HARTFORD, Conn. — Connecticut may be
seeing its first legal same-sex “marriages” this week, and Catholic bishops and
other groups are taking bolder steps to defend the institution.

The “Constitution State” became the
third state to impose same-sex “marriage” by judicial fiat on Oct. 10.

The state’s Supreme Court ruling in
Kerrigan v. Commissioner of Public Health toppled as
“discriminatory” a law that gave civil unions every benefit of marriage except
the name. This development should be an eleventh-hour wake-up call that the
stakes involved in the Nov. 4 elections are huge, according to pro-family
activists.

As the Register’s daily news blog (NCRegister.com)
was the first to report, the 4-3 court decision galvanized the state’s bishops
to back a referendum with the potential of changing the Connecticut
Constitution to protect marriage.

And on Oct. 15, the U.S. Conference
of Catholic Bishops announced it is developing a national plan of action to
defend marriage. The move came in response to the “societal implications of
legislative and judicial efforts to redefine marriage,” according to a bishops’
conference press release.

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of
Louisville, Ky., chairman of the new ad-hoc committee, said Oct. 16 the
conference began discussing the plan in June and held its first committee
meeting in September. The move wasn’t directly in response to judicial activism
in any particular state, he said, but because marriage is being challenged and
misunderstood nationwide. (See related story on page 3.)

California voters might reverse
their court-imposed redefinition of marriage by approving a ballot initiative
on Election Day. Marriage amendments will also be voted on in Arizona and
Florida.

With funding from the Knights of
Columbus, the U.S. bishops plan to develop a brief Internet video, utilize
social networking websites, and redistribute their 2003 statement on marriage,
“Between Man and Woman.”

Archbishop Kurtz could not say how much of the plan will be in gear before the
presidential election, which legal experts predict will have a dramatic impact
on the direction of federal courts nationwide.

According
to the candidates’ statements, Republican John McCain thinks “courts should not
be in the business of legislating from the bench.”

Democrat
Barack Obama suggested in remarks to a Planned Parenthood gathering what kind
of judges he would appoint. He said, “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the
empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to
understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled,
or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

Obama
wants to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act. It protects the
sovereignty of state marriage statutes and recognizes marriage as only between
one man and one woman in all matters related to federal law.

When
a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman
came to the Senate, both Obama and McCain voted to kill it without even
allowing it to be debated. However, McCain voted for the Defense of Marriage
Act.

Federalizing State Cases?

Matt
Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage, predicted that some time after
the election, same-sex advocacy groups will “federalize the issue using
Massachusetts, Connecticut and possibly California as a launching pad.”

The
Connecticut case was the outcome of a lawsuit originally filed in 2004 by the
Boston-based Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) on behalf of
same-sex couples who were denied Connecticut marriage licenses. It’s nearly
identical to GLAD’s 2003 Goodridge
v. Department of Public Health,
which led to same-sex “marriage” being imposed by the Massachusetts Supreme
Court.

One
of GLAD’s current projects is to redefine marriage in every New England state,
according to its website.

Daniels
believes the only long-term defense is passing a federal constitutional
amendment, a move the bishops’ conference has supported in two past attempts.

Meanwhile,
all 213 parishes in the Archdiocese of Hartford will be asked to promptly
distribute the Connecticut Catholic Conference statement condemning the latest
court ruling, Michael Culhane, the conference’s executive director, said Oct.
15.

The
Connecticut Catholic Conference statement urges Catholics to vote Yes on the
question calling for a constitutional convention and right of referendum.
Bishops said the court decision “raises a very real concern about the
infringement on religious liberty and freedom of speech with the judicial
imposition of same-sex ‘marriage.’

“The
real battle in this court case was not about rights, since civil unions provide a vast number of legal rights to
same-sex couples, but about conferring and enforcing social acceptance of a
particular lifestyle, a lifestyle many people of faith and advocates of the
natural law refuse to accept,” they said.

The
Connecticut homosexual advocacy group Love Makes a Family hopes voters defeat
the constitutional convention referendum. “This is the biggest threat to our
newly won right to marry,” said Anne Stanback, the group’s executive director.

Catholics Don’t Realize

Culhane
said the secular media is focusing on jubilant homosexual activists and giving
short shrift to the position of the bishops and the Family Institute of
Connecticut, which is backing the referendum.

Daniels,
who is not Catholic and whose Alliance for Marriage is nonsectarian, said that
getting information out is key.

“Our
biggest problem is even most devout, committed Catholics don’t realize what’s
coming because the secular media has blocked it out,” he said. Connecticut
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal will not appeal the Kerrigan
case on the federal level because the decision was “solely an interpretation of
state constitutional law,” he said. His spokeswoman, Tara Stapleton, declined
further elaboration.

Peter
Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, said, “The
Kerrigan decision has no more actual basis in the
constitution than Roe v. Wade does,” referring to how judges liberally inferred
that the right of privacy allowed for legalizing abortion. He claimed Blumenthal
used a “losing strategy” to begin with, by not arguing why Connecticut statute
reserved the term marriage to heterosexual unions forming the basis of
families.

In
his dissent in the Kerrigan case, Justice Peter Zarella made a similar point.
He said the majority opinion failed “even to identify, much less discuss, the
actual purpose of the marriage laws.” He concluded, “The ancient definition of
marriage as the union of one man and one woman has its basis in biology, not
bigotry.”